Opposition meeting chaired by Nitish Kumar in Patna on June 23, Rahul Gandhi to attend

Prominent leaders from Opposition parties will meet in Patna at a gathering being hosted by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in a bid to put up a united front against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the Lok Sabha elections. The meeting, earlier scheduled to be held on June 12, was deferred over some parties deciding to send their representatives, instead of top party leaders, to the meeting.

At a press conference called on Wednesday, JD(U) national president and party MP Rajiv Ranjan Singh and Bihar’s Deputy CM Tejashwi Yadav announced that the meeting of Opposition parties will be held on June 23. They added that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and party president Mallikarjun Kharge have assented to attend the meeting.

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Top leaders expected to attend the meeting include West Bengal CM and TMC chief Mamata Banerjee, Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, Samajwadi party chief Akhilesh Yadav, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, Shiv Sena chief and former CM Uddhav Thackeray, NCP patriarch Sharad Pawar, DMK chief and Tamil Nadu CM MK Stalin and top Left leaders including Sitaram Yechury of CPM, D Raja of CPI and Dipankar Bhattacharya of CPI-ML (Liberation).

The meeting in Patna on June 23 is likely to be followed up with subsequent meetings in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.

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The meeting in Patna is expected to send out a signal that Opposition parties are united in their fight against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government. “There is an undeclared emergency in the country under the rule of the BJP-led NDA at the Centre and those questioning the government’s policies are being harassed,” Tejashwi said at the presser yesterday.

The meeting also comes as a bid to send out a message that the efforts being undertaken by Nitish to unite the Opposition ahead of the Lok Sabha elections were not falling apart. There was an understanding within the Grand Alliance in Bihar that Nitish calling off the June 12 meeting over his insistence on the presence of party presidents had sent out an unfavourable message.

The meeting in Patna on June 23, however, is likely to skip the issue of seat-sharing for a later date. It is believed that Congress could be asked to limit itself to contesting 250 seats as per Nitish Kumar’s formula for the 2024 Opposition alliance. Seat-sharing could turn out to be a sticky issue as the Congress appears to be insistent on contesting 350 seats.